The creation and display of new images and art forms has been the goal of artists since the beginning of man. Even early cave dwellers drew, painted, carved or sculpted images of animals and other representations of their environment, sometimes on the walls of their caves. Some of the images generated by these artists even incorporated the nodes occurring on the rocks or the veins and cracks disposed therein into their sketches and drawings.
Early man also used sticks, stones, berries and like portions of their surroundings to give form and color to their drawings. At each age through history, artists saw the possibilities of new discoveries and tools for the advancement of artistic expression, and through such advancement, the concomitant advancement of the human spirit or soul.
Other art forms involve the congruous or incongruous arrangement of similar or dissimilar objects and things in a familiar or unfamiliar setting to produce an attention-getting and hopefully pleasing visual effect. Of course art, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
One recent example of such a mixture of objects to create an interesting visual effect is Picasso's "Bull's Head" (1943) which comprises a bronze cast of various bicycle parts in which the seat is used to suggest the animal's face and the handle bar suggests the animal's horns.
With the advent of the computer, ever new challenges have arisen from the ability to quickly create mathematical representations which heretofore could only be manually plotted after hours of meticulous labor. One such phenomenon is the so-called "moire pattern".
As is well known, the "Moire pattern" is an interference phenomena caused by the interaction of multiple images. Moire pattern generation has been discussed for a long time, e.g., Scientific American, May 1963 which described the use of such patterns in a variety of applications from measuring instruments to patterned fabric.
In one prior patent (U.S. Pat. No. 3,589,045) Rakowsky teaches the use of identical images spatially separated from each other while visually aligned so that the pattern created thereby will vary depending on the angle from which it is viewed.
More recently, Head (U.S. Patent No. 4,885,193) created a new art form which provides a plurality of optical images and illusions by the novel coaction of at least two diverse line and curve patterns disposed in spaced generally parallel relationship to each other.
However, in our modern high-tech society, there is a growing fascination with abstract and mathematical graphics and a need for an art form which depicts action in the terms of the scientific age. It is believed that the present invention fulfills that need by providing dynamic, constantly changing images and illusions implemented by a motor driven device operatively associated with at least one of a spaced plurality of patterned transparencies or a transparency and a separate non-transparent image so that the relationship between the moving pattern and another moving or static transparency or non-transparent pattern creates a dynamic, constantly changing visual illusion to the observer.